Room 641A’s real legacy isn’t about technical infrastructure or corporate jurisdiction — it’s about how easily critical knowledge gets buried. The old Wired documentation of the 2006 case seems to have disappeared.

Former AT&T technician Mark Klein is the key witness in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s class-action lawsuit against the telecommunications company, which alleges that AT&T cooperated in an illegal National Security Agency domestic surveillance program.

Former AT&T technician Mark Klein is the key witness in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s class-action lawsuit against the telecommunications company, which alleges that AT&T cooperated in an illegal National Security Agency domestic surveillance program.

Klein’s evidence is a collection of sensitive documents he retained when he retired from AT&T. Those documents are now filed under court seal, but Wired News independently acquired and published a significant portion of them in May, 2006. Those excerpts follow.

Study Group 3, LGX/Splitter Wiring, San Francisco

This four-page excerpt is from a 60-page document a management technician “left lying around on top of a router,” says Klein. It describes AT&T’s efforts to install splitters on internet fiber optic cables at the company’s San Francisco internet hub. Page 2 describes the splitter and lists the equipment at the receiving end of the tapped lines. Page 3 is a diagram depicting the tap, and page 4 details some of connections between the splitter cabinet and what Klein calls a “secret room” housing the equipment.

0_2

1_2

2_3

3_2

SIMS, Splitter Cut-In and Test Procedure

A departing AT&T technician gave this 44-page document to Klein as he cleaned out his desk. These two pages, excerpted by Klein, show AT&T re-rerouting its high speed data circuits through the splitter cabinet that performs the physics of the alleged wiretaps. The work was apparently overseen by AT&T’s Network Operations Center in Bridgeton, Missouri. “SIMS” is an unexplained reference to the secret room, according to Klein.

__4_3

5__

Cut-In and Test Procedure

These two pages, excerpted by Klein from another “Cut-In and Test Procedure” document, further illustrate AT&T re-rerouting its high speed data circuits for the surveillance, according to Klein. Page 1 diagrams the new connection through the splitter cabinet, and page two shows AT&T phasing in the fiber optic splitters on its high-speed links to other ISPs, including ConXion, Verio, XO, Genuity, Qwest, PAIX, Allegiance, Abovenet, Global Crossing, C&W, UUNET, Level 3, Sprint, Telia, PSINet, and the Mae West interconnect.

Many people later described the program as a Bush administration implementation of mass surveillance. Here’s the POGO recap:

…despite the fact that intelligence failures related to 9/11 were primarily based not on a lack of data points but on an inability to connect the dots, the Bush administration launched an effort to collect dots on an unprecedented scale. The President’s Surveillance Program, known by the code name Stellar Wind, undertook three audacious aims: First, to collect the content of international communications on a mass scale. Second, to collect telephony communications records (who you call, when, and for how long) on a nationwide scale. And third, to collect internet metadata, also on a bulk scale. These systems were built on nationwide dragnet orders demanding companies continuously supply private information not on suspects, but rather from all individuals across the United States.

According to another Wired article (also with dead links to the source material), Klein cited the Bush administration in his decision to reveal the secret rooms.

Klein said he came forward because he does not believe that the Bush administration is being truthful about the extent of its extrajudicial monitoring of Americans’ communications. “Despite what we are hearing, and considering the public track record of this administration, I simply do not believe their claims that the NSA’s spying program is really limited to foreign communications or is otherwise consistent with the NSA’s charter or with FISA,” Klein’s wrote. “And unlike the controversy over targeted wiretaps of individuals’ phone calls, this potential spying appears to be applied wholesale to all sorts of internet communications of countless citizens.”

PBS Frontline still has their interview with Klein available. And of course Klein’s self-published book still seems available in archives.

One of the nice things about Klein (arguably giving him legit whistleblower credibility) is how he wanted the right people to know what was going on, but he himself didn’t want to be known.

Klein has not spoken publicly since May, 2006 when he spoke on the courthouse steps in San Francisco. […] They are vacumming everything going across those links, I’m certain of it. That’s the physical arrangement; there’s no dispute about it, I looked at the cables, I traced the cables. I know where they went. The documents show where they went; they go to the secret room. I was watching [President Bush’s December 2005 press conference about the wiretapping program] and I was getting angrier and angrier — so most people hearing that would think ‘I don’t make calls to Al Qaeda so that doesn’t affect me.’ That’s what they wanted you to think. They tried to make you think it was about phone calls, but a lot of it is also about the internet and about gobs and gobs of information going across the internet and that affects everybody. And that’s the part they haven’t let out, and that’s the part I decided had to be uncovered.

The NSA’s domestic spying program thus wasn’t uncovered by leaked classified documents but by technical blueprints “left lying around on top of a router” for regular staff to see. Surveillance’s vulnerability lies in a dependence on oath and obedience, calling upon ordinary technicians with access to physical infrastructure to maintain loyalty beyond the pale.

And now two decades later these documents have largely vanished, much like the technicians reading them. What remains are secondhand summaries, dead links, and sealed court records. The erosion of technical evidence leaves a new era of protocol designers with incomplete knowledge, making future systems susceptible to repeating past vulnerabilities.

The Bluesky protocol, despite being a modern, decentralized platform, reflects some of these same risks. Bluesky’s heavy reliance on centralized Relay and indexing services echoes the architectural flaws that made Room 641A possible:

• Relays act as central aggregation points where all user data must flow.
• App Views maintain centralized indexes, which require comprehensive network visibility.
• Federation is only implemented at the application layer, while network traffic flows remain concentrated.

Unlike fully peer-to-peer systems, this design creates predictable chokepoints vulnerable to Room 641A-style interception. While software inherently depends on hardware, Bluesky’s architecture amplifies surveillance risks by consolidating traffic through critical points.

Until we integrate the lessons from seasoned experts and whistleblowers like Klein into system design, we’ll continue building flawed platforms while convincing ourselves that they are entirely new.

Even more forgotten? Terry Childs, a network administrator for the city of San Francisco, was arrested in 2008 for refusing to hand over administrative passwords to the city’s FiberWAN system, effectively locking the city out of its own network. While these actions sparked significant controversy, there was never enough public exposure or reporting about how he had pulled a “641A” — engaged in tapping the data center (drilled holes into a wall and split fiber from the backbone into a reinforced cabinet with encrypted servers).

Related:

…Hugging Face released a dataset composed of one million Bluesky posts, complete with when they were posted and who posted them, intended for machine learning research.

The buried lede here is that someone had to use Facebook to make an official statement about elections.

In a Facebook address Tuesday watched by tens of thousands of people, Venancio Mondlane again demanded a recount of the October 9 vote which the electoral commission said was won by the Frelimo party in power for almost half a century.

“We lost 50 people shot by the authorities who were supposed to protect these people,” said Mondlane, referring to a police crackdown on waves of protests he called against the election.

The conflict stems from Mozambique’s post-colonial history, one of my longest and most focused research areas, as I wrote on this blog in 2006:

It begs the question what Mozambique would have looked like if someone hadn’t assassinated Mondlane (February 3, 1969). Killing a powerful liberal-but-left American university professor of history, a respected leader within FRELIMO, ended his moderating influence over a freedom movement. FRELIMO was operating more peacefully under Mondlane as he and immediate colleagues left out rigid dogma or hierarchy; they openly invited interplay of conflicting views and positions. His assassination by the US regressed freedom and propelled turmoil.

Basically FRELIMO (Mozambique Liberation Front) ruled since independence from Portugal’s fascist dictatorship in 1975. The party transformed from the fight for liberation into (arguably due to American assassination and subterfuge) political dominance, maintaining power through a combination of legitimate support and contested electoral processes.

Several key aspects stand out in terms of today’s news:

• The use of Facebook for official opposition communications reflects both the weakness of traditional media access for opposition voices and the growing importance of social media in African political discourse. This echoes patterns seen in other African nations where social media becomes a crucial platform for opposition voices when traditional media is state-controlled.
• The allegations of 50 deaths in election-related violence, if verified, would represent one of the more serious instances of electoral violence in recent Mozambican history. However, election violence has been a recurring issue in Mozambique, particularly during local elections.
• The demand for vote recounts is a common opposition strategy in contested African elections, seen previously in Kenya, Zimbabwe, and other nations where ruling parties maintain long-term control.

How much of this violence is attributable to Facebook owning the platform in Mozambique for public discourse? I’m not saying Facebook necessarily was causal in the violence, rather that it’s more a symptom of broader issues in Mozambican democracy. The platform’s unnatural high-exit barriers and undemocratic privatization of infrastructure reflects the lack of alternative spaces for political opposition to communicate with supporters. And also that Facebook may be causal.

When Facebook becomes the de facto platform for political communication, it intentionally creates a dangerous anti-democratic dependency where a private foreign company effectively controls access to political discourse. Facebook’s algorithms and content moderation policies tend to amplify political tensions and shape how opposition movements organize and communicate. This isn’t unique to Mozambique, given we saw similar dynamics in Myanmar, Ethiopia and… the United States.

Facebook causing violence, like Tesla causing chemical spills, isn’t the core issue here as bad as it may seem, however. Facebook’s dominance was a symptom of institutional weaknesses that has setup a transition into becoming the cause (perhaps similar to how FRELIMO went from liberation to domination). A foreign-state service monopoly mindset of American businessmen likely exacerbates this. The key issue is in fact the privatization of what should be public democratic infrastructure.

Just as FRELIMO’s transition from liberation movement to ruling party was enabled by control of state resources, Facebook’s transition from communication platform to political infrastructure was enabled by network effects and data monopolies.

The critical difference lies in accountability. While FRELIMO must at least maintain some veneer of democratic legitimacy in a government role within Mozambique, Facebook faces no such local (or even international) constraints. This creates an unprecedented situation where crucial democratic infrastructure is controlled by an entity with no democratic accountability to the population it serves.

The Myanmar and Ethiopia parallels also obscure how Mozambique represents something distinct and more like the United States. We are witnessing a case where Facebooks’s role in political communication was normalized before its potential for amplifying violence was fully understood. This makes it an important case study in how privatized democratic infrastructure becomes dangerously entrenched even in the absence of acute crises.

Arguably the “soft” path to platform dependency might actually be more dangerous than the more visible crises in Myanmar or Ethiopia.

A Warning From Technology History

When Amazon executives casually suggest giving AI “a budget” to autonomously make purchases, they reveal a fraud hiding in plain sight. Like Bernie Madoff’s “consistent returns” or Lance Armstrong’s “natural talent,” their promise of beneficial AI agents masks a familiar system of exploitation. The Wired article breathlessly celebrating these developments reads like the financial press praising Enron’s “innovative accounting” – willfully blind to obvious red flags.

The Digital Company Store

Consider the coal towns of Appalachia, where companies paid workers in “scrip” — private currency only valid at the company store. Today’s tech giants build the same trap with more sophisticated tools. When Amazon’s AI agents make “personalized recommendations” based on your “preferences,” they’re creating digital scrip, a closed ecosystem where your choices are invisibly constrained and every transaction reinforces their control.

The Grover Shoe Factory disaster and Triangle Shirtwaist fire weren’t accidents, they were the inevitable result of systems that sacrificed human safety for efficiency metrics. Today’s rush to autonomous AI systems follows the same pattern, but with one crucial difference: when these systems fail, they won’t just destroy bodies they’ll eliminate human agency itself.

The Standard Oil Lesson

Standard Oil’s strategy was brilliant in its simplicity: promise customer choice while systematically eliminating alternatives. Their legacy runs deep. They fueled Nazi Germany’s war machine through Swiss intermediaries while claiming “business neutrality.” With careful metrics and corporate structures, foreshadowing thousands of Tesla crashing into buildings and exploding across America, they distanced themselves from the bombs falling on London.

Today’s tech giants use similar layers of abstraction — LLMs, cloud services, and AI agents — to distance themselves from human consequences. The Salesforce celebration of declining consumer trust while pushing for more AI autonomy shows how Meta’s role in Myanmar’s genocide wasn’t a bug; their systems predictably optimized for “engagement metrics” that amplified ethnic tensions. Just as Standard Oil knew exactly what their fuel would enable, tech companies understand perfectly well how their algorithms drive social destruction. Just as you might not trust the ship you’ve been pushed onto to cross the ocean, you also keep “using” an autonomous propeller and don’t jump overboard because your actual consent/agency has been removed.

IBM Should Never Be a Precedent

The term “AI agents” reveals a dark truth – these are indeed agents, but not working for you. IBM’s punch card technology, marketed as “efficient business automation,” became the technical infrastructure for the Holocaust. IBM’s Watson personally ensured their systems could process humans for genocide at unprecedented scale. Today, IBM markets their AI with the same “Watson” brand. How’s that for a chilling reminder of how corporate memory works, erasing an inconvenient truth of their history?

Knowing Why President Grant Won

Contrast this with Ulysses S. Grant’s approach to technology. As general and president, Grant understood that technology should serve human needs while maintaining human accountability. He mastered horsemanship not to make horses autonomous but to work in harmony with them. This wisdom guided him to create the National Weather Service, which still stands as a model for responsible automation that enhances rather than replaces human expertise.

When a hurricane approaches today, the Weather Service shows how technology should work. Meteorologists use AI to amplify their reach and effectiveness, like Beowulf with the strength of thirty men. Each forecaster can protect more people, make better predictions, serve their communities more effectively. Imagine instead if we had privatized weather prediction, with autonomous AI agents making evacuation decisions based on ‘engagement metrics’ and ‘optimization scores’ to save those who paid for premium service.

Mussolini published in his 1932 Doctrine of Fascism that “History does not travel backwards… Neither has the Fascist conception of authority anything in common with that of a police ridden State” and then he built exactly that police state and he dragged Italy back to feudal oppression. Hitler told reporters at the end of 1933 “At least we have not set up a guillotine. Even the worst elements have only needed to have been separated from the nation” right before he ordered guillotines installed at every detention facility and systematically beheaded 16,000 of his political opponents.

Today’s tech billionaires deploy the same doublespeak: promising liberation through AI while building automated systems of mass capture for total control, claiming to enhance human potential while systematically eliminating human agency. The absurdity of the double-speak scenario shows exactly what’s at stake: will AI enhance all human agency with public safety concepts like the Weather Service model, or bring Hitler and Mussolini-fever dreams back by the tech billionaires’ authoritarian visions? Does anyone, especially those proudly wearing his name, remember Leland Stanford (namesake of a Silicon Valley college-admission-to-human-oppression pipeline) was never prosecuted for corrupted industrialization of gross fraud and mass genocide?

The doublespeak and intentional deception is inherent in fascist rhetoric for a very simple reason: destruction of integrity for a centralization of power. Mussolini’s claim that fascism isn’t about police states and going backwards was itself part of the fascist playbook. Hitler’s claim to not be using the guillotine was foreshadowing, not a safeguard. Saying one thing while doing exactly the opposite, creating confusion and destroying the ability to hold power accountable, is how Thiel, Musk, Trump… corrupt government representation and undermine all digital safety in a push backwards into tyranny.

The Pattern Is Clear

My warnings about technology’s dangers have been consistent. In 2011, I warned readers of this blog to delete Facebook accounts due to Russian infiltration years before the 2016 election revelations. In 2016, I wrote here and went on speaking circuits to expose Tesla’s automated driving program as manslaughter if not murder. I could see that instead of fixing their fraud their “AI” cars would only become even more dangerous. Today their AI is killing more people than ever while their stock rises, which serves us as the perfect example of how markets reward the cruel elimination of human agency and accountability.

Tesla Death Rates Are Not Normal

Each time, the same pattern emerges: dangerous technology wrapped in progress-oriented marketing while early warnings are dismissed as “anti-innovation.” By the time the damage is undeniable, systems of control are already entrenched. With AI agents, this pattern unfolds at unprecedented scale and speed.

Since 2021 the death toll from predictable safety failures in Tesla AI engineering has more than doubled.

The Window Is Closing

When Standard Oil fueled Nazi bombers, when IBM optimized genocide, and when coal barons trapped workers in company towns, let alone when Leland Stanford set off his “killing machine” targeting Native Americans, they each claimed to be neutral service providers while building systems of control. Today’s AI systems promise to automate exploitation at scales those barons could only dream of.

The question isn’t whether these systems will be abused, it’s how much damage will be done before we admit what should be obvious: replacing human agency with corporate algorithms isn’t efficiency, it’s exploitation. The only guaranteed winners, to paraphrase Thiel’s manifesto grotesquely promoting his vision for unjust monopolization, are those trying to corner and centralize the market of technology — or in this case, the AI agents.

I’m not claiming to see the future. I see the past with both eyes open. The window for action remains political and evolutionary, not yet worse, but it’s closing fast just like the 1930s.

The choice is clear: demand AI that enhances human agency and expertise, and enforce it as such, or accept a slide to digital tyranny that would make even the worst of robber barons blush.

History will not accept “nobody warned us.” This is your warning. What would Grant do?

The Heritage Foundation among others have just allegedly signaled an intention to purge America of democracy.

In mid-September, as tech billionaire Elon Musk intensified his efforts to elect Donald Trump as president, a wave of letters arrived at the Department of Transportation, asking the agency to turn over any emails and text messages that federal workers sent about the world’s wealthiest man and his sprawling technology empire. …Mike Howell, executive director of the Heritage Foundation Oversight Project, is responsible for a substantial share of the requests. “We’ve been planning for some time what to do if there’s turnover in the administration.” …submitted around 65,000 requests to federal agencies under the Freedom of Information Act, a law that governs public access to records produced by the government. […] America First Policy Institute, a group with close ties to Trump’s transition team, has also requested agencies turn over training materials about diversity programs and any records that outline all senior level positions.

Let’s look at how history helps explain this news. The foundations of American governance were shaped by systematic mechanisms to control political participation. As documented in Gerald Horne’s “The Counter-Revolution of 1776,” the revolutionary period’s Committees of Safety operated as early data-gathering and enforcement bodies, methodically identifying and removing officials who might resist an emerging system centered on preserving slavery against British judicial constraints like the 1772 Somerset decision.

The Constitutional framework formalized these control mechanisms. While state constitutions of the 1780s began to expand democratic participation (notably Pennsylvania in 1776), the federal Constitution of 1787-88 crushed them with more restrictive frameworks. As historian Robert J. Steinfeld shows in “Property and Suffrage in the Early American Republic,” this included property requirements and indirect selection processes that concentrated national power among elitist pro-slavery politicians.

The Federalist administration demonstrated how these mechanisms could be weaponized through the 1798 Sedition Act. As Richard E. Ellis details in “The Jeffersonian Crisis,” this established a pattern of using ostensibly neutral legal tools to grab and hold political control — a pattern that would be repeatedly deployed to preserve and expand the American race-based caste model (unjust system of white male dominated hierarchy) for the decades to come.

It was President Jackson (Trump’s stated favorite) who in 1829 truly systematized political purges by using personnel records to remove officials who opposed slavery let alone his plans for racist genocide (Indian Removal). Woodrow Wilson then further perfected such practices by 1913, systematically cataloging federal employees’ race to enable mass firings and segregation. By his second term he invoked tactics to spread mob violence and deploy federal troops for oppression of political opponents (e.g. 1919 Elaine, Arkansas massacre) leading into the “Red Summer” of widespread lynchings as well as mass graves (e.g. victims of the 1921 firebombing of Tulsa).

To be clear, I’m uncovering no stones here.

These tragic chapters of American history are no secret to historians. In fact it’s the opposite, as the tragedy of America has been pored over by those looking to emulate the racist violence with similar ambitions. A century of innovations in data-driven political purges very clearly caught the attention of a particular German in 1933, who thought he could get away with it just like so many Americans had. You may recognize the name of the student of American history who promised to take the virulent hate espoused by Henry Ford and put it into practice abroad: Adolf Hitler.

In just one simple example, the 1934 Nazi Commission for Criminal Law Reform directly cited President Wilson’s American racial classification laws as models. Many have written about this aspect of the knowledge transfer into Hitler’s hands, let alone the role of Americans fueling Nazism. Deeper into the historical analysis, however, it seems few Americans seem to realize that plans for the genocidal Auschwitz death camps were based directly on earlier American detention centers erected on the border with Mexico. Wilson’s concept of mass population control meant people were systematically doused with a pesticide, which was adapted by the Nazis and rebranded with the German name now associated with genocide: Zyklon-B.

The Heritage Foundation’s mass collection of federal employee data today, along with a wave of heated “detention and deportation” rhetoric, represents the latest chapter in the American story of political sabotage by white nationalism.

Requesting 65,000 sets of communications and personnel records, while specifically targeting diversity programs and senior positions, comes out of an old and familiar playbook of American white male tyranny. Just as Nazi officials methodically gathered information on civil servants’ political leanings and racial backgrounds before their 1933 takeover — directly copying early American methods — this current effort appears designed to take the credit back and identify political targets for removal and intimidation… if not execution.

The focus on diversity programs and senior leadership positions particularly echoes how authoritarian movements historically identified “unreliable” elements for removal. These patterns of systematic information gathering before purges trace directly to American precedents (pun not intended):

• Wilson’s administration collected records on federal employees’ race to enable resegregation
• Nazi bureaucrats used personnel files to identify Jewish civil servants and political opponents
• McCarthy’s investigations gathered detailed records on government employees’ associations and beliefs

The Heritage Foundation’s relationship to the “America First Policy Institute” is no coincidence — it directly invokes Wilson’s white nationalist platform. Just as Wilson invoked the “America First” platform of the KKK to justify institutional purges and racial terror, today’s movement explicitly builds on his blueprint for dismantling democratic safeguards. Their systematic targeting of diversity programs and senior positions shows how precisely they’re following established American patterns of institutional capture:

The modern twist is using FOIA — a law designed for government transparency — as a tool for creating target lists while maintaining plausible deniability. This mirrors how historical movements often weaponized existing legal mechanisms for authoritarian ends.

From Andrew Jackson to Woodrow Wilson to Adolf Hitler to Donald Trump, a disturbing pattern emerges in how white nationalist movements attack democratic institutions through manufactured victimhood narratives. While the specific contexts and recorded numbers of mass harm differ dramatically, understanding these recurring tactics can help us recognize dangerous political patterns before they fully develop into widespread violence.

Jackson’s tactics went beyond mere rhetoric — he systematically dismantled institutional checks by combining populist appeals with targeted removal of career officials. By positioning the professional civil service as an “elite” obstacle to “the people’s will,” he created the template for how to paralyze institutional resistance while maintaining democratic pretense. His famous defiance of Worcester v. Georgia — “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!” — demonstrated how to render constitutional protections meaningless through strategic institutional sabotage.

Wilson’s presidency marked an out-loud point of white supremacist power in American governance, despite many to this day still claiming they don’t see it. His administration resegregated federal offices, screened the “Birth of a Nation” in the White House, and promoted Lost Cause mythology to paint whites as the true victims of Civil War to end slavery of Blacks. This institutionalization of white grievance politics — KKK propaganda of “America First” meant to emphasize the white race as superior to African/Asian/Hispanic Americans — provided the template that Hitler studied and admired.

Hitler explicitly praised America’s racial laws and institutions in “Mein Kampf”, along with the antisemitism of Henry Ford. He saw in both Jackson’s Indian Removal policy and Wilson’s America a model where democratic institutions were used to enforce racial hierarchy while maintaining a veneer of legality, even striving to go further than Jackson’s legacy of genocide and Wilson’s industrialized segregation. The Nazi regime’s early racial laws openly said they drew direct inspiration from both American Indian Removal policies and Jim Crow, while also notably saying the Germans wouldn’t be so barbaric as America.

Just as Hitler built upon earlier examples while operating in a different context, we see concerning echoes in modern politics of Trump. These tactics remain remarkably consistent:

1. Manufacturing False Crises
   • Jackson: “Savage” threat to frontier settlers
   • Wilson: “Black domination” during Reconstruction
   • Hitler: “Jewish conspiracy” and Reichstag fire
   • Trump: Fabricated immigration emergencies and election fraud claims
2. Corrupting Legal Institutions
   • Jackson: Defying Supreme Court on Indian rights
   • Wilson: Using federal power to enforce segregation
   • Hitler: Transforming courts into tools of Nazi ideology
   • Trump: Attempting to weaponize DOJ and courts for political ends
3. Claiming Victimhood While Pursuing Dominance
   • Jackson: Settlers as “victims” of Native Americans
   • Wilson: “Lost Cause” mythology
   • Hitler: “Stabbed in the back” myth
   • Trump: “Great Replacement” theory

The Supreme Court’s dismantling of Reconstruction-era protections offers a particularly relevant warning. The Court ruled that the federal government couldn’t protect citizens from private violence through the Enforcement Acts — a decision that enabled decades of racial terror. This same legal logic could be weaponized today in reverse: not to limit federal power to protect minorities, but to expand federal power to target them under the guise of “emergency” or “security.”

An insidious modern tactic involves appointing leaders specifically chosen to destroy the very institutions they head — a form of institutional sabotage that would have been familiar to Hitler’s strategists.

Consider these parallels:

• Placing officials hostile to civil rights in charge of civil rights enforcement — echoing how Reconstruction’s protective mechanisms were turned into tools of oppression
• Installing partisan loyalists in intelligence agencies — reminiscent of how Hitler transformed professional intelligence services into instruments of party control
• Appointing department heads explicitly committed to dismantling their agencies’ core missions — similar to how Nazi officials hollowed out German civil service
• Using loyalty tests to purge career officials while installing partisan actors — matching how professional bureaucracies were transformed into party instruments

The strategy of institutional destruction through targeted appointments shows sophisticated evolution from historical patterns.

Now consider these mechanisms:

• Election Administration:
  • Installing officials who reject election results they dislike
  • Placing partisan actors in neutral oversight positions
  • Removing professional election officials who defend integrity
• Environmental Protection:
  • Appointing industry lobbyists to regulatory positions
  • Dismantling scientific advisory boards
  • Replacing career scientists with political loyalists
• Intelligence Agencies:
  • Installing leaders who dismiss foreign interference evidence
  • Removing officials who raise national security concerns
  • Politicizing intelligence assessments
• Justice Department:
  • Appointing officials who view prosecution as a political tool
  • Targeting career prosecutors who maintain independence
  • Converting law enforcement into a mechanism for political retribution
• Education:
  • Placing opponents of public education in leadership
  • Dismantling civil rights enforcement mechanisms
  • Using educational institutions to promote partisan ideology

This systematic approach to agency capture goes beyond mere political appointments. It represents a sophisticated strategy to:

• Identify key positions that can be used to paralyze agency functions
• Install loyalists who will ignore legislative mandates
• Remove career expertise that could resist politicization
• Transform agencies into instruments of partisan control
• Use institutional powers to target political opponents

Key patterns to watch:

• Manufacturing crises to justify emergency powers
• Demanding personal loyalty over institutional duty
• Using courts to selectively apply constitutional principles
• Inverting protective mechanisms into tools of oppression
• Claiming victimhood while advocating violence
• Appointing institutional saboteurs to key positions
• Transforming professional agencies into partisan weapons

History teaches us that would-be authoritarians don’t just attack democratic institutions directly — they corrupt them from within by inverting their purpose. Those who know the past are condemned to recognize when it repeats.

Jackson turned “popular sovereignty” against tribal rights. Wilson transformed federal power from protecting Black citizens to enforcing their subjugation. Hitler studied these American examples to learn how democratic systems could be turned against democracy itself.

Today, we see similar inversions under “America First” that have been its meaning since it developed out of nativist anti-immigrant violence of the late 1800s: Claims of “election integrity” used to restrict voting rights. “Law and order” rhetoric deployed to justify lawlessness. “States’ rights” selectively invoked or ignored based on whether they serve white nationalist ends. The Department of Justice and courts — institutions created to protect rights — at risk of becoming tools for their destruction.

The challenge isn’t just protecting specific laws or institutions, but recognizing how those very protections can be weaponized. Democracy dies not only through outright revolution, but through intentional manipulation of its own mechanisms.

When we see these historical patterns beginning to repeat, the window for preserving democratic governance is already closing.

For military and intelligence leaders, this history carries special weight. Your oath to the Constitution requires understanding that these aren’t foreign tactics being imported — they’re American innovations being deployed again. When you swear to defend against all enemies “foreign and domestic,” you’re committing to resist patterns of institutional subversion that were born here, perfected here, and must be stopped here.

The echoes of Jackson, Wilson, McCarthy and Hitler in modern politics aren’t just historical curiosities — they’re urgent warnings that demand immediate action to protect democratic foundations before they’re corrupted again beyond norms of political repair. Your constitutional duty requires recognizing these tactics for what they are: not legitimate political discourse, but the calculated dismantling of democratic systems using democracy’s own tools.